December 21, 2012
by ACEAMC
Summary: According to every religion on earth, the world will end on this day. A neiborhood is torn apart . . . and yet brought togeather on this day.
1. December 14, 2012

December 21, 2012.

"Anything good on TV?" Eddy asked as Ed randomly flipped through channels. Double d, who was normally the first to arrive at sleepovers, was surprisingly tardy this time. He had just arrived through Ed's window like vent that often served as a door from the outside when Ed found a channel he liked; oddly enough it was the history channel.

"Sorry I'm late, fellows!" the sock-headed boy answered as he sat cross-legged near the TV. The program's narrator began to speak, _**according to the Mayan calendar; the world will supposedly end on December 2012, at 11:11 on the 21**__**st**__**. this is reinforced by the I-ching, the book of revelations in the bible, multiple other Indian cultures, nostradomous and the teachings of Merlin. No one knows how, but-**_ Double d turned the TV off and ranted in disgust, "How dare a channel supposedly called the history channel post ancient speculation as fact!"

Ed, who was sweating in terror turned the TV back on, "Oh no!" He was really panicky about this kind of stuff, and very gullible. _**Some say it'll be a flood, or famine, or even an asteroid, but whenever the forth horseman comes,**_ _**have your bible ready.**_ Then the TV screen faded to black. "We're doomed!" Ed shouted as he ran from the room.

"Oh come now Ed," Double d called as he raced after his friend, "We're not doomed, people have been making prophecies like this for decades!" Eddy was left in Ed's filthy room. Today was the fourteenth of December, and the year was, of course, 2012. Eddy broke out in a scamming grin, "I'll make a buck off this if it kills me!" He whispered as he ran after his friends.


	2. December 15, 2012

December 15, 2012.

"End of the world insurance!" Eddy shouted from atop a crude stand, "Get your end of the world insurance here! Insures against floods, Blight, asteroids, anything!" Double d was there, humiliated over his friend's scam, and Ed was begging for some insurance, which Eddy gave to him free of charge. All they really were were soup labels with random promises scrawled on the back of them. "Really, end of the world insurance!" Johnny looked excited before turning to his wooden friend, plank, "What do ya mean it's a scam?" nonetheless, Johnny bought the insurance. So did Jimmy, Rolf, and two of the three kankers. Only Nazz, Kevin, Sarah, Marie kanker, plank apparently, and secretly Eddy saw through the scam. Thus was the cul-de-sac divided over the issue of the end of the world. But what of Double d? His inner common sense screamed that no such thing could happen, but some tiny voice asked inside him, _what if?_ He shook this off as paranoia as the Eds hurried off to buy jawbreakers, for the first time in a long time. "Should've thought of this in the first place!" Eddy commented. "Come now Eddy, this end of the world stuff can't last forever."

"It doesn't haft to! It only has to last a week!"


	3. December 16, 2012

December 16, 2012

Ed spent all night on it. Gathering a lifetime supply of food, water, and gravy isn't easy you know. Then he packed it into his bathroom, this would be his bunker when the world ended. He had his life planned out for when the world ended: he would move his TV into the bunker and watch monster-movies on Sundays, and every-other day he would spend playing card games with his friends.

Something kept Double d up. It wasn't his bed; he'd just washed the sheets. It wasn't school; he loved it! But what was it, then? _The end of the world, perhaps?_ That same voice asked. That's silly stuff! Double d shot back, turning over once more, trying to get comfortable and eventually sleep silenced the mysterious voice.

The next morning the three went to school for the last time before Christmas break. Everyone who doubted the apocalypse thought about the holidays. Soon gingerbread men would be baked and carols would be sung. But those who believed could only think about death and destruction.

And that's when Johnny got the idea . . .


	4. December 17, 2012

December 17, 2012

Johnny ran from one house to another, delivering hand written invitations to every doorstep. The last time he held a party, no one but the Eds came. But this time he was sure people would come. Plank was with him and he telepathically communicated with him, as he often did (in a voice that sounds suspiciously like frylock from aqua teen hunger force)_** Johnny, you know I'm only humoring you in helping with this party. The only reason I'm doing this is that you're a socially awkward twit. I mean, look around; you need more friends than me.**_ In truth, plank knew the truth about this end of the world stuff, he just didn't say anything. "Thanks buddy!" Johnny laughed as he put another invitation on Rolf's doorstep, "This could be the last party we ever throw!" _**yeah, whatever. Just don't forget the bean dip!**_

Double d found the invitation sitting on his doorstep. It was shaped like a mushroom cloud, and read in magazine pieces:

ComE tO tHe enD of thE WoRld DanCe!

aLL yOur FavOriTe SonGs, FoOd, FriENds,

OnE LasT ChaNcE to SaY GoOd-bYe AnD any-

ThiNg eLse!

WheRe: JoHnny's HouSe.

When: DeCemBer 20,

FrOm 6-10 P.m.

DoUbtErs weLcomE!

"Might as well." Double d mumbled, storing the paper in his hat.


	5. December 18, 2012

December 18, 2012.

Rolf moved his goat victor and his chickens into the spacious cellar they would now share with his other animals. He too had heard legends about the world ending from his nana, and being superstitious believed it. Before shutting the cellar door for the last time, he looked at the kids playing in the street. _Foolish go-go children._He thought as he hid in his hovel.

"Put your back into it May!" Lee and May were shoveling up dirt like there was no tomorrow, which according to them there wasn't. "Is this big enough, Lee?"

"Yeah, that'll work. Let's shove it in." the Two Kankers lifted their trailer home, which would be their bunker, and shoved it into the hole, forgetting Marie was asleep inside it. She was tossed from her bed to the wall, which had now become the floor. _**What the?**_ Crawling through sideways doors, she popped her knuckles, "alright, who's the wis-" she was hit by a stray shovelful of dirt from May, "Sorry Marie!"

"What are you two clowns doing? Diggin' to china?"

"Buryin' our bunker. Go grab a shovel!"

"Bunke- don't tell me it's this 'end of the world' whatzit!"

"We wanna be safe, not sorry." _**God, I'm related to idiots!**_ And after thinking this she found the invitation and planned to go to Johnny's party, _**Fer the heck of it! I need a break from my crazy sisters!**_


	6. December 19, 2012

December 19, 2012

She was finally getting sick of it. For the past week practically everyone in town had been calling her and sending her stuff. Normally Nazz Relished the thought of admirers, but this was crazy! A few years ago something similar happened on midsummer's day, but this was at least fifty times worse. She disconnected her home phone, changed her cell phone number, and threw every single letter addressed to her that didn't come from a relative into the fireplace, and kids still managed to bug her in the middle of the night. It was all cause of this end of the world stuff, and she knew it. Every boy who ever liked her, even the ones who said they didn't believe in it either, tried to ask her out on dates set right before or on the twenty-first. If she kept all of them, she'd haft to date five boys at any given minute from that afternoon to midnight on the last day. And if there was some sort of apocalypse, there was no way she'd waste her time doing that. But still boys rung her doorbell from dawn to dusk, like one was doing right then.

"Oh, hey Double d." Nazz mumbled, sounding bored.

"G-greetings Nazz." He stuttered, feeling inadequate. He really wasn't even sure why he was doing this, the world could go on as normal without saying or doing something so stupid, but he did it anyway. "I'm sure you are aware that Johnny is holding some sort of celebration at his home tomorrow."

Nazz sighed, leaning on her doorframe, "Double d, I'm going to be honest with you, since you're one of the nicest guys I know. I'm being suffocated by guys trying to ask me out right now, and I don't really feel like dating at all."

"Really?" Double d's blush faded, and yet he felt even stupider than before, "But you've always seemed like the type who would love that sort of thing."

"Actually, when it's piled onto you, everyday you get sick of it. Besides, right now I'm not even sure if I like guys."

"Oh . . . really." Now the conversation contained a note of irony in a symphony of awkwardness. "Well, I best be going then, places to go, people to see, such and such." Nazz smiled, "Sorry double d, I hope you enjoy the party anyway."

"Me too." Double d stumbled away, one tiny storm cloud away from being the sorriest sight in peach creek.

Double d sighed a few hours later as he watched Eddy still taking advantage of the people's paranoia by selling anti-asteroid helmets. Double d was the one who made them, but he knew they wouldn't work. First off, they were merely old hard hats he found at the junkyard he added a layer of tinfoil to, and mainly because the most prominent danger posed by an asteroid is a mixture of instant combustion, earthquakes, and starvation caused by a layer of ash blocking out the sun and causing plants to wither. _Just like the dinosaurs when they went extinct. _"We're not going to go extinct the day after tomorrow!" Double d mumbled to the voice at the back of his head as Eddy scammed ten dollars off Rolf, who now never left his house without wearing Bobo over himself like a shield. Double d sighed and leaned back, looking up at the sky. Compared to the usual snowy days of winter, it was pretty dry this year. But the clouds were moving in; Double d calculated that snow would arrive long before night fall. "Mind if I share this block?" Double d looked behind him and almost choked on his own breath. Marie Kanker, a constant childhood dilemma for him, was now asking if she could sit next to him, instead of trying to put him through the usual unspeakable horrors she committed. "I- um- uh . . . oh what do I care? Go ahead." She sat down on the cement with a sigh. "So . . . where's May and Lee?"

"Those two are drivin' me crazy, what with this end of the world stuff."

"Yeah, I know that feeling." He sighed, looking at Eddy who stuffed a twenty in the jar from Johnny. "Is it all right if I ask you something Double d?"

"Sure, what is it?"

"I was wondering, if you didn't mind . . . could you tutor me or something like that?" Double d looked back at her, surprise accenting his wise face, "I never knew you cared about education, Marie!"

"I actually didn't, before everyone started freaking out. But lately I've been thinkin' . . . I've skipped so much school and never done any home work, and for the most part never really worked at all. For awhile that was fine for me, but now since people are afraid that their future's gonna fly out the window I've been thinkin' about mine. What kind of a future do I have?" Double d thought for nearly a minute before she continued, "Exactly. I guess what I'm trying to say is . . . I want to do something with my life other than just get married and have kids with some random guy. I wanna go places." Double d sighed, thinking back to a time long ago, "Would you like to know why I study as hard as I do?" Marie gave a short nod and Double d closed his eyes, visualizing the worst point of his life.

"When I was very little, long before I moved here, I was tormented by my peers. I actually used to be a lot like Ed, only with reasonable intelligence for my age. I read comic books and watched many monster movies in my spare time. I was often bullied by fellow classmates for being, quote "A total weirdo." Then one day, while I was reading an article on the possibility of life on other planets, I was pulled into the most sickening moment of my childhood:

"Hey weirdo!" young Double d felt something tug him up from the concreate he was reading on by the back of his shirt. It was Blake, a class bully bent on mayhem, "Can't you people leave me alone for one day?" Double d asked, as the fiend dragged him to a wall. "No can do Edd," Blake smirked at his friends, who were assembled by a wall, "We need a player for dodge ball, and seeing as you aren't doing anything we'll take you."

"But I was doi-"

"Reading about all that alien garbage doesn't count either!" Blake was much older than Double d, and was much more violent, "The only thing that matters in the real world is strength, let me show you." Double d was shoved against the wall and held back by a pair of Blake's goons. Then the circle of kids started tossing balls at Double d, in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes other sports supplies, such as the tennis racket Chris threw at his knees.

"That's why my knees are so weak." Double d sighed, letting this sad ballad flow from him, to what was once just another bully.

"Ouch."

"But that's not the worst part: The worst part came when Blake tossed a dodge ball at my head and it hit the wall. The result is hidden under my hat. From that day forward I knew that I didn't want to be their definition of "Strong", I wanted to prove myself to the world some other way. So I chose brains, my intelligence would take me anywhere I wanted to go. And the only place I wanted to go was up, so high that they could see that they were wrong about me." Double d felt something cold on his nose, and then the snow began to fall, slow and drearily.

"Oh great!" Eddy shouted "Now how am I supposed to-" he turned to Double d and almost jumped out of his skin when he saw a Kanker. He almost ran for his life before he saw that Double d was also sitting there. "Oh, so now you're friends or something?" Eddy asked Double d, but he ignored him. Instead he was looking at the snowflakes that were falling into the palm of his hand. They were a deep red. "Odd." He mumbled when Rolf came running back to the Eds, wearing both his asteroid-proof helmet and Bobo, "Double d edd boy! You are wise in the ways of nature yes? Please explain this to Rolf!" he held out an Eggplant that was crawling with what looked like a cross between a cricket and an ant. "What's a bug doing in the middle of winter?" Marie asked, apparently smarter than anyone thought. "They appear to be aphids, but their far bigger than any I've ever-"

"Not good guys, not good!" Ed ran from the direction of the creek, soaking wet and shaking. "Geez, what's with you Ed?" Eddy asked as a bullfrog was dropped unceremoniously dropped into his hands. "I Was at the creek, trying to freeze myself like Zorgag the valiant did in Zorgag the valiant issue 197, but these froggies wouldn't let me!"

"Ed, you could have gotten yourself killed and- what was that about frogs?" Before Double d could say anything more Ed dragged the four kids to the creek.

"Ok, I'm stumped." Eddy announced, staring at a creek full of croaking bullfrogs. Then it all clicked in Double d's mind, "This is just like the ten plagues of Egypt."

"The what?" The four kids asked.

"The ten plagues of Egypt was an alleged natural occurrence in Egypt that led to the freedom of Israelite slaves from the pharaoh. The first plague was a bloody river, which here can be translated into snow, and assuming that Ed's frogs came next in the list and then Rolf's aphids that's the first three."

"So what comes next?" Marie asked.

"Flies."

"CREEPY CRAWLIES!" Jimmy shouted, running towards Double d at top speed.

"What troubles you, fluffy-head Jimmy?" Rolf asked, backing away as Jimmy buried his face in Double d's shirt. He pointed behind him, to an advancing cloud of flies of every type, from horse flies to mosquitoes.

"Holy mackerel." Ed gaped.

"RETREAT!" Double d started running back towards his house with a train of kids following while outrunning the unseasonal amount of bugs. Double d nearly tripped on the doorway of his house while fishing for his key. "Double d, they're gaining!" Eddy shouted as the horde of flies closed in on the six. At the last second Double d found his key and unlocked the door. The kids rushed in and slammed the door on the insects, killing the first wave. They all sighed with relief, and Rolf even set Bobo down for the time being. "What in the name of Rudolph Valentino's going on around here?" Jimmy asked, cowering away from the door. "Only one way to find out," Double d sighed, climbing up the stairs to his room, "When the flies clear I'll need someone to go get some of that red snow and those aphids, and maybe a bullfrog too." The other kids stared in shock at Double d but quickly understood; old sockhead had some studying to do.

"Now this is weird!" Double d adjusted his microscope once more, to get a closer look at the now-melted snow. The others leaned over him, waiting to hear what he had to say, "First off, I can tell that there are no proteins in this mixture, therefore it is neither human nor animal blood." Everyone sighed with relief . . . Except for Ed, who groaned with disappointment instead. "So what's the deal? Snow's not supposed to fall red, you know!" Eddy reminded them, trying to sound smart. "Well, at first I thought it might be volcanic ash, but on closer inspection that didn't seem to be the case." He pushed the chair away from the desk and looked at his friends in confusion, "It almost looks like plant cells, as if it were a dye of sorts. But the cells are . . . different."

"What do you mean by different?" Marie asked, looking into the microscope herself.

"Well, as you can see, these cells have seven sides, like a 3-d pentagon. But plant cells are six-sided boxes. And what's more, usually plants produce green chlorophyll, but this cell's rendition is nothing like that. It's red as blood! Why it's . . . like nothing I've ever heard of." The others got a sinking feeling from hearing that. "What about the accursed tiny insect, one-who-formerly-knew-everything Eddboy?"

Double d sighed, pulling the slide containing the dead insects in it, "These bugs are much like aphids; however their cell structure is like nothing I've ever seen either. Also, every last one of them died when they were brought into the house. It's as if the heat itself killed them."

"If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen." Ed smiled, lifting the Petri dish that held the bugs up to eye level to get a closer look.

"I'm afraid I have no answers today gentlemen," Marie feigned-coughing into her fist before Double d corrected himself, "And lady, of course. I fear that . . . well . . . I don't know." Those words, even from a common man, can be unsettling. But from Double d they were simply frightening. "Well, I better be getting home now!" Eddy announced, "Dinner's gotta be cooking by now."

"Yeah, don't want my sisters hogging the beans again."Marie sighed, following Eddy towards the door. Before leaving she looked back at Double d and his mystery plagues and sighed. Getting smart was hard work, as even she could tell.

"Rolf must return to farm hidden in the shed, two-questions-and-no-answers Eddboy." Jimmy and Rolf left at about the same time, Jimmy turned back as soon as he reached the door, "Thanks for saving me from the creepy crawlies Double d!" Finally Ed left, but only after begging Double d several times to let him keep the aphid creatures. When they were all gone Double d flopped down on his bed, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands the way he did when something big was troubling him. In his mind more than just the plagues were troubling him. It was the fact that he couldn't decipher them. Had Blake finally won, in an indirect way? After mulling it over Double d opened his eyes, and they caught sight of a poster of Albert Einstein on his wall, with the word **Think** emblazoned I white underneath it. Einstein was a man who revolutionized the way we look at life; from the largest stretches of the universe to the tiniest details of an atom. And now that chance had fallen to Double d, and he would rather die than let it slip past! He pulled off several heavy textbooks from his shelf, looked up a few scientific websites on his new laptop and even poured himself a cup of coffee to get the job done right. It was funny, he'd never before in his life enjoyed coffee enough to drink a whole mug of it so fast, maybe he was just overexcited. Or overdoing it.


End file.
